And the next and the next and the next and
Sometimes Rainbow Dash slept, and sometimes she sat in place, but she no longer dreamt. At the end of the day—as well as at the start—she only had herself to blame.
Her wings felt tired, not that such exhaustion was ever put to the test. She never used them. It was becoming difficult to think of a time when she did. It was becoming difficult to parse memories from expectations. It was becoming less difficult to care.
Every gaze resembled the first and the last. Every corridor. Every stairwell. She shuffled on for what felt like years, with each turn and corner as gray and sterile as the one previous. There were windows. And there were wings. Rainbow Dash remained on her hooves. The guilt piled on, collecting its own atmosphere. She inhaled more than exhaled these days, feeling her insides painted with the same predictable shades. A comforting palette, perhaps. Safe, numbing, predictable.
A labyrinth, this was not. Rainbow Dash had long memorized the corridors, the alcoves, the platforms. She simply never committed them to memory. Even if the mare had a neat blueprint of an egg, it was useless from the inside, and nothing was waiting for her on the outside. And nopony. Hatching was pointless. So was incubating. And existing...
Rainbow occasionally thought about colors. They were in her name, after all. A name that was pronounced less and less. The echoes were memorized as well, and they all were nothing but a poor mimic of her. And what's an even thinner sound than silence?
There were days when she tilted her head up—when she saw the blinding white pockets looming far beyond the lattice work foundation of that infinite forest. She pondered that such was where the colors went—and the memories attached to them. Venomous, toxic things, like a bed of rusted nails that she refused to lay on. Stinging barbs that rang with the songs of a past life, caroling about adventures and camaraderie and all manner of awkward hijinks.
But those were ghostly shades and nothing more, severely lacking the substance necessary to find a home within Rainbow's porous surface. She had laid worst beds in recent years, and each waking moment found the white pockets looming further and further away. Rainbow lazily assumed—for she had long evolved beyond the capacity of hope—that the colors locked away might find her on their own, or perhaps some scant glowing pigments hitherto unimagined, and that she might stumble upon them with the least effort possible, trotting around a corner on heavy hooves to find something unique and startling and thrilling beyond the stone gray malaise.
Each turn was the same. Each stroll mirroring the same perpetual oblivion. Each useless day spent in the useless trek. Hallway after hallway, precipice beyond precipice. In a predictable rhythm of nothing. But—it was still a rhythm, and Rainbow Dash put it on repeat, until there was nothing left of her to put words to the habit. Until there was nothing left to measure the degree to which she had committed herself to not being committed to anything. Until there was nothing.
She thought of flying—but that too was a rhythm, or else it once was. A pattern that once carried color—adrenaline, too—but soon became quite terribly diluted in the homogenized compartmentalization of time. So—after enough tasting and digesting and smelling—nothing.
Rainbow Dash thought of the Wonderbolts. She thought about hard work. She thought about struggles and challenges and the ever grinding climb up an impossible hill. But ultimately she thought of the view from the peak once she arrived, and how with no more lengths to climb there was nothing to look forward to except for the illusion of looking forward to something. Which ended up also nothing—although this nothingness stung, fermented over a lifetime of falsehoods, pretense, and inevitable betrayal. She couldn't think which was more horrible—being lied to or lying to herself. Until she found a third option, and its gray chambers stretched on forever, filled with empty spaces, the ultimate concrete truth.
She thought of friends. She thought of loyalty. She thought of warm and pleasurable vibes that came with companionship. But with those thoughts came the unshakable realization that without those delectable vibes, friendship itself would be just as important to Rainbow Dash as doors inside this unnameable place that currently encompassed her. “Loyalty” itself was nothing more than a word used to sanctify the degree to which desperate vessels of chemical happenstance depended on each other, and the only reason her loyalty was ever an elementary bastion of severe importance was that she and her friends laid on thick pretense to mask how insufferably selfish, impulsive, and abrasive she truly was to each and every one of them, and—in time—the labors needed to extend that farcical play greatly outweighed the joyous vibes that were earned in performing it. So Rainbow simply stopped performing; she hopped off the stage and descended far below the theatre, outrunning whatever scant few attempts were made to anchor her in place. And all the wanton cruelty of her ghostly departure from that once-sacred circle still couldn't hold a candle to how holocaustal a crime it would have been to perpetuate it, poisoning her familiars with that cruelest weapon of all: tolerance.
Rainbow had regrets. For a time, she felt remorse and longing and other lazily-named things. But—as the descent consumed her... became her—she felt nothing but the shadow left by “feeling” itself. It was something far more abysmal than sorrow—comfortably deep where the light and colors couldn't touch—so that the details of the detritus she made her bed in lacked any details to scream at. Not that she wanted to scream. Not that she wanted anything.
She simply trotted on. She turned a corner and there was nothing. She'd turn another corner and there'd be nothing again. She did this out of instinct, not expectations, but the one thing that lingered—the one thing that cursed her just subtly enough that Rainbow Dash knew that there was a vacuous hole forever unfilled—is that she forever remained aware that there'd be an existence without this rhythm... and... most of all... it was an existence she would never ever deserve.
At any moment, she might spread her wings. She could spread her wings. But Rainbow never did. The effort was too much and the herculean resistance scarcely worth it. There was one earth, but there were many gravities, each successive force pulling harder than the previous. And—as the epochs went on and the turns rendered less and less color—it became abundantly clear that there was no sky. Or—if there was one—Rainbow had fallen far too deep and burned too many bridges to ever earn it.
What softly lowered Rainbow's eyes—on the scant few occasions when resting against all that emptiness counted as the barest skeleton of a respite—was a glaring fact... one that would have once flabbergasted her, even infuriated her, in a life where she performed a hollow play against a shallow setpiece of colors.
It was the fact that this wasn't a disease or a disorder or any other abstract target that could be so relievably labeled under the desperate guise of a cure. This was simply her natural state. Everyone's and everything's. Someday, those abandoned vessels she once called friends would end up there as well, even if their distant wastelands would forever be separated, never shared. This was none other than the nothing that everything ended up in. And in some queer way, that meant that they would somehow be together again. And forever.
And then Rainbow's eyes closed, and it was just the same as if they were open, and she realized that the dreams that her last shred of self obsessed over would never come, and the only thing more horrible than realizing that was that it didn't matter.
And then it didn't matter. And Rainbow slept. Until she didn't. And she trotted around the next corner. And the next. And...
